Gail E. Wyatt, PhD

Academic and Clinic titles:

Professor, Dept. of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior
Director, UCLA Sexual Health Program
Director, Center for Culture, Trauma and Mental Health Disparities
Co-Director, HIV/AIDS, Substance Abuse and Trauma Training Program (HA-STTP)
Co-Director, UCLA/South African Trauma Research Training (Phodiso) Program
Co-Director, Tirisano Training Project
Clinical Psychologist
Sex Therapist
Senior Cobb Fellow in Health Disparities

Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, PhD has been awarded the Dena Bat Yaacov Endowed Chair in Psychiatry. A Clinical Psychologist and licensed sex therapist, Dr. Wyatt is a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and BioBehavioral Sciences at the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Behavior at the David Geffen School of Medicine and the first African American Psychologist at DGSOM to be so awarded. Dr. Wyatt’s focus over 48 years has been on health disparities. Alliance and Pepperdine universities, respectively, have awarded her honorary doctorates for her community-based research that has generated over 250 publications and six books, thus far.

She was the first person of color to receive the prestigious NIH Research Scientist Career Development Award for 17 years and developed methodologies to capture the cultural context of stress and oppression overlooked in clinical research that contribute to misdiagnoses among people of color. She was the first African American to receive a license to practice Psychology in California. She founded and directed the Center for Culture, Trauma and Mental Health Disparities and the Sexual Health Programs for 16 years, served as one of the Associate directors of the UCLA AIDS Institute for over two decades and has received continuous funding from NIH, private foundations and state organizations since 1980. Her landmark research chronicled the prevalence of sexual abuse among African American men and women and with her findings, helped to extend the reporting limitations of abuse and violence that has facilitated survivors to disclose their past abuse.

Dr. Wyatt has provided Congressional testimony 10 times, and of those testimonies, two were before then senator Joseph Biden at the Violence Against Women hearings. Dr. Wyatt wrote “Stolen Women: Reclaiming our Sexuality, Taking Back our Lives” by Wiley and Sons, is a best-seller that details the effects of slavery and oppression on African American women today, based on 20 years of her research. Dr. Wyatt has had domestic and international training and research grants that have resulted in her mentoring hundreds of men and women in Jamaica, India, East Africa and South Africa where her team continues to train scholars in trauma and mental health effects. She has been instrumental in leading NIH funded research teams of color since the 1990’s. She is well known speaker: She has given community level and professional presentations in every medium, including on Oprah Winfrey’s Speak Sis series about Black women’s mental health.

Dr. Wyatt has received numerous awards for her work in diversity, inclusion and trauma risks for people of color at risk for or living with HIV. This overdue recognition could have not been possible without the creation of a close and supportive network of family, friends and resilience to match that of her ancestors She has been married to Dr. Lewis Wyatt for 56 years, has a son, a plastic surgeon and graduate of UCLA medical school, two granddaughters and a daughter who was also a UCLA medical school grad and is now an angel.